The current PV system has some serious problems:

1. It's unreasonably difficult to harm high PV monsters with normal hits
2. Since critical damage is multiplied before PV, critical hits deal absurd amounts of damage

I propose replacing the current damage calculation with the following:

1. Let D be the raw damage of an attack (modified by powerful/mighty blow, if appropriate)
2. Let R be D/PV (the ratio of raw damage to PV)
3. Let p be a carefully chosen piercing value (the higher p is the less influential PV is)
4. Multiply raw damage by a factor of 1 - 1/(R + p) [if this is negative the attack does 0 damage]
5. If the attack is a critical hit multiply this result by the critical hit multiplier

I'd suggest choosing p somewhere in the range of 0.8 to 1

The main effect of this system is to increase the amount of damage done by lower damage melee attacks. This is good because it lessens the frustration of needing to wait for critical hits to do any damage. At the same time it lessens the power of critical hits, which is important given the higher multipliers available. Also, this system preserves the power of mighty blows, since these increase the value of raw damage (this means that, as before, mighty blows are especially effective versus high PV targets). For high damage attacks (relative to PV), this system behaves about the same as it did before.

This was discussed at some length here: http://www.adom.de/forums/showthread...ts-be-modified . Credit for the system proposed in this RFE goes to grobblewobble.